My own time machine

I have built a time machine. It doesn't work, it has never worked, and I keep building it anyway.

The destination is always 2016. Sometimes the trip is quick — a flash of a thought while I'm walking the dog, a two-second jump where I simply don't do the thing I did. Other times it is an engineering marvel. I have versions of this daydream with subplots. I construct intricate details about exactly when I will zig instead of zag. I have rehearsed alternate conversations so many times that they have the texture of memory. I have built out a whole branch of the world that does not exist, and I have furnished it.

And then I keep driving down the highway, and I'm still here, in the year I actually live in, having spent something real on a place that isn't.

Psychologists have a name for this. It's called counterfactual thinking — the mind's habit of running if only simulations against the past. The upward variety, where you imagine an outcome better than the one you got, is the kind I specialize in. In small doses it can serve a useful purpose by allowing you to extract lessons from failure and adjust course. It's the reason you check the stove twice after the one time you didn't. But it has a failure mode. When the decision is far enough back that no adjustment is possible, the simulation stops producing lessons and starts producing something else. It becomes rumination wearing a lab coat. It feels like problem-solving, which is exactly what makes it so hard to put down. The mind is convinced it is working. It is only idling at high RPM.

Here's what finally got my attention: mental energy is not infinite, and it does not roll over. I spent too much time from 2023-2026 revisiting a decision from 2016 that is unchangeable. Meanwhile, my daughter was telling me something from the passenger seat. Meanwhile, there was a problem at work that a fully present version of me would have solved in twenty minutes. I was not there for those things. I was time traveling. The daydream doesn't announce itself as a cost, because it doesn't feel like spending. But every hour has a ledger, and mine had too many entries designated "time machine."

Then there is the paradox. Every good time travel story eventually collides with the grandfather paradox — go back, change the past, and you erase the conditions that sent you back in the first place. I always found that a fun bit of physics. I did not expect to find it sitting in my own life.

Because who is it, exactly, that wants to go back? It's a man who has been through the consequences. Who got humbled in ways he could not have imagined and would not have volunteered for. Who spent time in a place he never thought he'd be, and came out with a set of instincts about people and second chances that he simply did not possess in 2016. That man is the product of the very decision he wants to undo. Send him back and he vanishes. What's left behind is the guy who didn't know any better yet — the guy who was capable of making that decision in the first place.

The time machine cannot save me. It can only delete me and put him back.

So I've been practicing something simpler and much harder: staying here. Reality is the only place with working controls. It's the only address where my effort actually lands on something — a client, a policy, a kid's homework, a phone call I've been avoiding. The past is a closed file. It is not neutral, it is not forgotten, and I don't get to pretend it didn't happen. But it is finished, and pouring energy into it is like sending mail to an address that has been torn down. The letters go somewhere. They just never arrive.

A few things I've learned, offered without any claim of having mastered them:

Name the trip when it starts. I've gotten better at noticing the moment I climb into the DeLoreon. Saying "I'm doing the 2016 thing again" out loud, or even just internally, breaks the spell surprisingly often. You cannot interrupt a process you haven't identified.

Ask what the daydream is actually for. Mine is usually not about 2016 at all. It shows up when I feel small, or unseen, or when something in the present is hard and the fantasy offers a version of me who never had to be humbled. It's a comfort object with a cover story. When I address the real feeling, the daydream loses its job.

Distinguish the lesson from the loop. The past has genuinely taught me things, and I want those. But a lesson is portable — you take it with you and use it Tuesday. A loop just runs. If I've extracted the lesson and I'm still in there rearranging the furniture, that's the loop, and the loop deserves nothing.

Convert the energy rather than just suppressing it. All that mental horsepower I've been spending on an imaginary different time line is real horsepower. Pointed at the actual work in front of me — the reentry work, the compliance work, my family — it does something. Pointed backward it does nothing but erode me.

Let gratitude do the anchoring. I've written before about gratitude lists, and this is where they earn their keep. It is difficult to be in an alternative timeline and be thankful for something in front of you at the same time. Gratitude is inherently present-tense. It's a hand on the shoulder saying: look, you're here.

I still take the trip. Less often now, and I get off earlier. Building the machine turns out to be a lifelong hobby I'm slowly losing interest in.

But I've started to make peace with something. If a working time machine appeared in my driveway tomorrow, and the price of the ride was becoming a man who never learned any of this — I'd like to think I'd leave it parked.

I'd rather be here, imperfect and accountable and awake, than perfect in a year that no longer exists.